Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  'Three women! Haya, haya! They are the victory gifts to the chief, hey?'

  Gideon brought both hands up and covered his mouth, laughing. 'Only one is isiXebe, my sweetheart, Peekay.'

  'Bring them all along then, you hear? Mr Nguni will be there, you will not be alone with all the white people.' Gideon seemed pleased. 'Thank you, Hymie, we will come.' Peekay touched Gideon lightly on the shoulder. 'The iBhunu was outclassed, you deserve a crack at the world title and I'm bloody glad it's you and not that shit Geldenhuis.' Peekay turned and reached for a clean, freshly laundered shirt which hung on a wire hanger from a hook on the wall. Gideon seemed to hesitate for a moment. 'Peekay?'

  'Ja?'

  'I meant what I said, you know, in the ring?' Everything hurt as Peekay turned slowly to face Gideon. He measured him with his eyes, just the suggestion of a smile at the corners of his mouth. 'Ja, I know, but you're going to have to fight a lot harder than you did against the policeman or you're going to end up with more than shit in your mouth, black man.'

  Gideon grinned. 'Your testicles are two dead frogs, white man!'

  'Already you have found three women to cower behind, kaffir!' Peekay shot back.

  They broke into simultaneous laughter, Peekay holding his recently strapped ribs, wincing with pain between his laughter. It was obvious that Gideon knew nothing of the plan to have Dutch Holland train him for the title fight.

  The party was well underway when Peekay and Hymie arrived, but someone must have seen them coming for the band struck up 'For he's a jolly good fellow!' the moment they entered. Peekay had to endure this embarrassment as the two hundred or more people present joined in song. He spent the first half an hour greeting people before he excused himself to go upstairs to Hymie's room to phone home.

  Fifteen minutes later he came downstairs again, and it was nearly midnight before he finally found himself alone again. He was dog tired; the elation at being the new world champion was beginning to wear off and his body was growing stiff and sore as his metabolism slowed down. He waited until nobody seemed to be looking before opening a french window and slipping quietly into the garden.

  Outside it was bright moonlight and he filled his lungs with the crisp autumn air. Peekay found himself standing in Solomon Levy's rose garden and he bent over a yellow rose, tipped with saffron. Cupping his hands on either side of the half-opened bloom he directed the exquisite perfume to his swollen nose, surprised and delighted that he could still capture the faint familiar perfume which reminded him of home and of his grandpa's rose garden. When earlier he'd called home his mother was unavailable to talk to him, but the old man had grunted his pleasure and told him, 'There's a good lad,' about six times, so Peekay knew that he was hugely delighted. Then his grandpa had said that Mrs Boxall and Miss Bornstein as well as old Mr Bornstein and old Mr McClymont, and Mr Andrews and Kommandant Kruger from the gaol - in fact everyone who was anyone and a lot of people who weren't - had called to say how delighted they were and how proud the town felt and that if he called, to tell him they wanted to be remembered to him. Peekay's grandpa chuckled. 'Georgie Hankin called to read me his front page in tomorrow's Goldfields News, it says: PEEKAY! MORE FAMOUS THAN JOCK OF THE BUSHVELD!'

  'Mr Peekay?'

  It was a young female voice and Peekay, surprised, straightened up, turning in the direction it came from. Standing in the soft moonlight stood the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen. He knew instantly it was the girl he'd seen crossing towards the ringside before Gideon's fight, though now she wore a green evening gown, her perfect shoulders, the colour of new honey, bare in the bright, cold moonlight.

  'Roses, you like roses? The welterweight champion of the world likes roses!' There was laughter and real surprise in her voice.

  Peekay pointed to the yellow rose. 'It's named Macreadie Sunset and is a variety bred by the Macreadie family who, for two hundred years, created some of England's most famous roses. This one is my grandpa's favourite, it's a very old variety and goes back to George the First.'

  Peekay reached into his pocket and withdrew the small pocket knife which had once belonged to Doe. He opened the blade, which was worn from constant honing, and bending over the rosebush he carefully cut the rose from the main stem. It was autumn, and he left a bud point at the end of the stem so that it would grow another branch to replace the one he'd removed. Then he expertly worked the half-dozen thorns off the stem of the rose using the side of his thumb, rendering it smooth and harmless. 'I suppose we ought to introduce ourselves, although I guess you already know who I am.'

  Tandia extended her hand. 'Tandia Patel, I'm a second-year law student from Natal University and…' she smiled and added a little breathlessly, 'I'm also Gideon Mandoma's girlfriend.'

  Peekay's heart missed several beats, though he managed to conceal his dismay. 'Would he mind very much if I gave you this rose, Miss Patel?' he asked, looking into her marvellous eyes.

  Tandia laughed. There was an attractive shyness to her laughter, as though she was holding some of it back. 'Maybe he'll. want to fight you, Mr Peekay?'

  'Peekay, please!' he grinned at Tandia. 'I guess he'll be doing that soon enough anyway.' He handed her the rose. 'So, what say we give him a proper excuse, Tandia?'

  She took the rose and brought it to her nose, closing her eyes as she inhaled its perfume. 'It has a beautiful smell. You seem to know a lot about roses?'

  Peekay grinned. 'I know a lot about roses, boxing, a little about law and nothing about you.'

  Tandia dropped her eyes, looking down at the rose she held. 'Me? There is nothing to tell.' She shivered involuntarily.

  'You're cold, Tandia. Come, we'd better go inside.'

  'Oh, but I've disturbed you!'

  'I can't think of a nicer way to be disturbed. Have you eaten?'

  'No, I've been too excited…well, nervous really.'

  'Don't be. I haven't eaten either and I'm suddenly ravenous. C'mon, let's go before Gideon comes looking for us. I've had all the fighting I can handle for one night. What I don't need is an angry Zulu warrior!'

  Tandia put her hand lightly on Peekay's shoulder. 'Peekay, you were wonderful! My father said you were the best. You and, Gideon, the two best prospects he'd ever seen. He said you'd be world champion one day. I only wish he'd been there tonight.'

  'Your father?'

  'Ja, he was a referee, he handled your first fight with Gideon in Sophiatown, when you were just kids.'

  'That Patel! The Durban referee? Why's that's absolutely amazing! You're Indian then?'

  'No, half. My mother was a Zulu.' As though anticipating his next question she quickly added, 'Both my parents are dead.'

  They'd reached the door and Peekay paused. 'I'm sorry to hear that, Tandia.'

  'Ag no, please, it wasn't like that. My mother died when I was a baby and my father, well it was…a strange relationship.'

  'If I may say so, they made a beautiful baby,' he paused, looking directly at Tandia. 'I mean that's strictly a professional observation, one lawyer to another, you understand.'

  'Why, thank you, my learned colleague,' Tandia replied, dropping her gaze from his.

  Christ, she's beautiful, Peekay thought.

  Tandia was amazed at how relaxed she felt in Peekay's presence. She'd observed him slip through the french window into the garden and had decided suddenly to follow him. The decision set her heart pounding and she was conscious of the male eyes which followed her as she moved across the room. The eyes of the South African whites, slightly guarded, afraid to look at her openly and the looks of the Odd Bodleians, open and frank in their admiration. On the way to Pretoria they'd stopped at Madam Flame Flo's new house in the coloured suburb of Meadowlands so she could change out of her bloodstained evening gown into the green one. She knew she looked sexy.

  Although Tandia had largely grown out of her shyness at Bluey Jay, away from h
ome she Was reserved. At university she was thought to be aloof. Many of the male undergraduates fantasized. amongst themselves about her. One or two of the braver and wealthier ones had jokingly suggested to her that they drive the six hours to Lourenco Marques in Mozambique which was Portuguese territory, where no colour bar existed, and spend the weekend. This was always couched as a joke but she knew that the slightest friendliness on her behalf would result in it becoming a reality in their minds. The assumption underlying everything, of course, was that she was a coloured so her virtue would be easily compromised.

  At first she'd been too intimidated to be blatantly rude and had simply remained silent, which had only made things worse. One day, when one of the more loutish, wealthy final-year law students named Lew Holt, who fancied himself and who drove a red MG convertible and played rugby for Natal, had been persisting for several days with the idea of a weekend away, she'd turned and smiled at him. 'You'll have to ask my brother,' she said sweetly.

  Holt was obviously taken aback at Tandia's reply but, true to form, recovered quickly. 'When? Where?' he asked cheekily. Tandia could see his mind working. 'How much?' he asked again.

  Tandia wanted to die on the spot, but the years at Bluey Jay had conditioned her and she remained smiling disarmingly at the stupid prick, though, if Holt hadn't been thinking with his one-eyed snake he'd have seen that her eyes were cold and hard, filled with her loathing for him. 'What is your question? When can you see him? Or, where can you see him? Or how much?'

  The law student grinned. 'All three, Tandia,' he replied.

  He looked around furtively and then tried to put his arm around her shoulders, but she backed away from him, though still smiling.

  'I'll ask him. Meet me at morning recess tomorrow in the main quad.'

  The following day Tandia gave him a location on the old road to Umhlanga Rocks and told him to be there at precisely two o'clock. 'There will be a Packard parked at the side of the road. My brother will be the driver. Please go alone.'

  Tandia had hoped that the silly bastard would get the message and not turn up, but Mama Tequila was right; the one-eyed snake is not known for its brains, and Lew Holt looked completely ingenuous as he carefully noted her instructions.

  Later, around four o'clock, when Juicey Fruit Mambo picked Tandia up at the gates of Natal University, he gave her his usual grin. 'I see you, Miss Tandy,' he said saluting her, then, taking her books as usual, he opened the back rear door of the Packard for her to get in.

  They drove off in silence, which was unusual for Juicey Fruit Mambo who was always curious about Tandia's day.

  Halfway home to Bluey Jay Tandia could bear it no longer. 'Well, what happened?' she asked.

  Juicey Fruit laughed. 'What happen for between mans, Miss Tandy. I not for you want to know dis thing.'

  'You didn't kill him, did you?' Tandia asked, suddenly alarmed.

  'Haya, haya, haya,' Juicey Fruit Mambo shook his head.

  'Den de policeman he come. and dere be many, many problems and dey take me away and who is going to drive for you?'

  'Thank you, Juicey Fruit. Maybe that will teach the bugger a lesson.'

  Juicey Fruit thought this was very funny and laughed uproariously, as though Tandia had made a huge joke, 'What are you laughing at, Juicey Fruit?' Tandia asked.

  'I tink dis boy he need a big, big, lesson for driving.' Juicey Fruit turned to look at Tandia, the whites of his eyes showing large. 'Same like Geldenhuis. I tell him, "Baas, dis car, it is very, very dangerous, look dere is no roof!'"

  Tandia squealed in delight. 'Juicey Fruit, not his red MG?' Two days later Lew Holt was back on campus sporting his left arm in plaster, though otherwise he seemed unhurt. He busily told everyone at law school about his accident and about how the MG had been totalled coming around a bend at eighty on the old road near Umhlanga Rocks. It seemed he'd missed the turn and taken it straight into a large syringa tree.

  A day or so later Tandia saw him ahead of her on campus and she ran to catch up with him, arriving breathless. 'Gee, Lew, I heard about your accident!' Holt could hardly believe his eyes, Tandia seemed genuinely distressed. 'Fuck off, kaffir!' he growled.

  Tandia smiled sweetly. 'Still an' all, hey, it could have been a lot worse, don't you think? Only a broken arm? You were lucky, man. If I were you I'd tell all my friends about that particular bend in the road, you don't want them running into the same tree now, do you?'

  Tandia hadn't only learned how to look sexy from Mama Tequila. Over the years at Bluey Jay she'd watched the old woman carefully, observing how she knew when to be soft and when to be hard. For Mama Tequila a compromise was a gesture you made on the way to achieving something else; no indiscretion, no matter how small, was left unpunished in the end. The Lew Holt incident was the first time Tandia had ever hit back and it consolidated this principle for her.

  Now, as she went back into the house with Peekay, she found herself surprisingly at ease, even excited by being with him. She'd expected some sort of contest, the male thing trying to assert itself and dominate her immediately.

  She would naturally comply with it, stroke the ego presented to her by the white boxer, play on the aspect of forbidden fruit, both as a coloured and as Gideon's woman.

  Peekay, she knew from Gideon, was liberated. Gideon said he simply didn't see colour. This made him vulnerable.

  He was the welterweight champion of the world as well as a brilliant young graduate from Oxford, Mr Nice Guy. He'd be bending over backwards not to show any skin bias and would also be over-anxious to appear modest and unassuming. But Tandia also knew that in the end the one-eyed snake in him would win. That would come later, that would be her ultimate weapon. Tandia knew it was important for her to make an impression on Peekay, and on the Jew also. Think ahead, she told herself. Think the bad things that can happen, because they will, for-sure. Think them out and have a plan of action. You must know who to know long before you need to know them. It was more of Mama Tequila's advice; and it was what had given her the courage to follow Peekay through the french windows to confront him in the rose garden.

  She'd found him smelling a rose, standing in the moonlight, his face battered and his nose broken, smelling a rose, happy to be by himself. She didn't know quite what she'd expected, but smelling a rose wasn't an acceptable discovery. She'd watched him in the clear, bright, cold night. There was a quietness about him, a lack of tension, like being in a warm, clean place. Yet she could feel the power. Tandia was an expert on power. Most power, she'd observed, was based on hating, though some was driven by ambition or triggered by wealth or arrogance or both. Power was about getting something, making people bend to your will, imagining something and then making it happen no matter what.

  The power she sensed around-the white man putting his broken nose into the petals of a yellow rose was different; it was infectious and seemed to swell and recede as though it was trying to include her within its spectrum. There seemed nothing complex about it; it was singular but simple, it made no demands on her and it made her feel safe.

  Tandia could never remember feeling completely safe; maybe when she was very young on Patel's knee when he was boasting to someone about her green eyes. The closest she could get to the feeling she now experienced was when she sat in the branches of the big old fig tree which grew beside her upstairs window at Bluey Jay. The tree seemed to be the only place in the world which was her own. In all the time she'd been at Bluey Jay nobody had ever seen her seated within its leafy canopy or discovered her secret. She had become so obsessed with the idea of its importance to her life that she waited, often until two or three in the morning, before she climbed out onto the branch where she would sit and think until the dawn came up and put the shine back onto the surface of the sweeping river that formed one boundary of Bluey Jay. Then she would creep silently back to bed, her head filled with enough cleanness to see her through another day. Th
e aura she now felt around Peekay made her feel the same way. This made her very suspicious and decidedly uncomfortable.

  He was white and gifted, brilliantly educated and a sporting genius. The white rose of South Africa's European culture would open its petals to him. There would be nothing he couldn't have: wealth, beauty, position and power. Nothing was beyond his reach; his skin was white and his eyes were blue and he would wake up between crisp, clean sheets every morning for the remainder of his life.

  Gideon said he was a white man who didn't see colour. In such things Gideon was a fool. White men like Peekay didn't need to see colour; truth and justice and understanding were abstract virtues for them and if, in the end, nothing changed, you sighed and laid your noble head down, satisfied you'd done your best. It was no less a crock of shit in the end than the policeman with a salivating alsatian at his side and a sjambok in his hand.

  Tandia hated all white men except Magistrate Coetzee and Dr Rabin. And this white man for whom she felt such a strange attraction was possibly the worst of them all. She should have known all along. When Peekay was still a boy Patel had eulogized him. Patel always ended up admiring the biggest white bastard in the pack.

  And so, seemingly in a matter of minutes, Tandia, having felt herself invaded, built her hate back up again, layering it with reminders, insights and the phantasmagoria of loathing until it regained its comfortable thickness. It had all been done by a white man who'd barely spoken to her, but who'd cut a yellow rose from a bush, removed the thorns from its slender stem with a practised flick of his thumb and quietly and politely handed it to her before inviting her to dine with him.

  Peekay and Hymie were a part of Tandia's long-term plan.

  She would graduate at the end of the year and, from what Gideon had told her, the law practice the two Oxford men were about to open seemed just the sort of place she'd like to join, the first rung in the ladder she would have to climb so she could get even with the world.

  Tandia was only just nineteen and she saw herself as a terrorist and a Communist, though she'd not yet effected any acts, even small ones, of terrorism or joined a secret cadre. This didn't stop her seeing herself as totally committed to the overthrow of the white South African regime and the implementation of a socialist state.